Starting in 1875 Ibsen tried to focalize the middle class life customs of his times and he wrote texts as “The columns of society “ (1899), “Doll house “(1879), “Ghosts” (1881) and “An enemy of people” (1882). Both “Doll house “ and a “Ghosts” concern marriage, its presumed inviolability and inseparability. The first one of these two dramas was just composed to surface the problem, by those times ever more felt and more common, regarding the parity of consorts inside marriage and the reciprocal respect both sexes must keep. “Doll House” consists of three acts and is centred on a feminine personage, Nora, wife of the advocate Helmer. She, years before, due to a serious disease of her husband, borrowed some money from a certain Krogstad, in exchange of a draft Nora undersigned with a false signature. The woman, even if trying to pay off the debt, did not succeed in it completely. So Krogstad has at any moment Nora in his grasps and so, time by time, he blackmails her. When Helmer, who by then was succeeding in his career and he is to be named director of a bank, is aware of the background, reacts against his wife with words of disapproval and reproach. He does not appraise the gesture done for love, but is only interested to his own good name and the estimation he must keep inside the circle of acquaintances, showing a false and petty moral sense. All that inevitably make them get far each other and unravels the veil Nora has in her eyes. She is finally aware of how few she is estimated by her husband and by the male world in general. Even if she enters again into the possession of the mentioned draft, Nora rebels against the oppressive tutelage of the man, and puts in act an unexpected revolution: she departures definitively, leaving her husband and sons, to be finally considered as a woman and not as an empty doll. The second drama that presents another woman as absolute protagonist of the action is “Ghosts”. It is composed by three acts too, it concerns the family events of Elena Alving, analysed during and after an occasional event: the inauguration of an asylum built in honour of the husband of Elena. At this ceremony are present her son Oswald, got back from Paris from few time and the pastor Mandess, she loved. During the inauguration her son Oswald, charmed by the brilliant Parisian life, sings its praises and talks about it fascinated even with the pastor, who get scandalized for the fact, while his mother does not take care much of, surely mindful of a marriage within which the dissolute life of her husband had hardly marked their union. Elena, indeed, during the marriage, has preferred to keep loyal to that idea of inseparability of the marriage, rather than break it up in front of all. Unfortunately Oswald is mined by a disease, probably venereal, his father transmitted him by inheritance, and it is feared that he can get mad in future. Also the affection of the loved Regina lacks to the young: her mother cannot but reveal him that Regina is his sister. And the incest must not be perpetrated. The drama finishes while Elena, who promises his son to give him the euthanasia poison in case he gets mad, cannot do anything but assisting, without being able to do nothing, at the sudden burst of madness of his son. In “Ghosts”, as well as in “Doll House “, the scene action is mainly entrusted to the feminine personage: Elena e Nora, in their wider characterial differences, meet almost like sisters in the whole failure of their love plans and marriages. A scripture quite close to “Ghosts” is “An enemy of people “, five acts, having as protagonist a physician and his own professional deontology. Doctor Stockmann, in fact, discovers that the water he works at are not bacteriological clean, showing instead microbes of a certain entity and quantity. He intends to reveal his own discover to all people, but he is defeated in his action of denounce since economic and political interest does not allow at all the crisis of the watering body. Stockmann, in conclusion, is defeated and at the end he asserts that “the most powerful man of the world is the one that remains alone “, showing a remarkable prostration condition, psychologically won by the interests for profit, in the reality put in chains and gagged by a society, more attentive to money than to the common health. (to be continued)

 

 

 

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